ACT and Vantor illegal-mining monitoring

The Amazon Conservation Team (ACT), a nonprofit that has worked with Indigenous communities in Colombia, Brazil and Suriname for about thirty years, uses satellite imagery to watch for illegal gold mining in places its staff cannot safely reach. Its main case is Río Puré National Natural Park in the Colombian Amazon, home to the Yurí and Passé peoples living in voluntary isolation, where dredges mine the riverbed and release mercury into the water. ACT works with AARIMO, a network of Colombian civil-society organizations formed to reduce the impacts of gold mining, and the imagery comes from Vantor, where ACT is a Purpose Partner.

The team compares current Vantor images against the company's archive, which goes back more than twenty years, to locate dredges and barges and follow their movement, then shares what it finds with authorities and partner institutions in Colombia and Brazil. Vantor's account, published in October 2026, says this has documented hundreds of mining barges and contributed to the destruction of more than 115 of them; ACT's own page from August 2026 gives more than 900 barges observed and nearly 100 destroyed after its alerts. A binational police and military operation in November 2025 that went up the Puré by boat and helicopter to blow up dredges was guided in part by this imagery. A July 2026 MAAP report produced with ACT and AARIMO puts mining deforestation inside the park at 506 hectares between June 2024 and May 2026 and notes that mining returned within months of each operation.

The work runs inside Vantor Hub, Vantor's hosted platform, where AARIMO staff task new captures and review them; the imagery is 15 cm resolution, enough to tell kinds of activity apart and to reduce the need for overflights. Terms and cost are not stated.

Operational and ongoing as of 2026.